I've been taking a great Interplanetary Flight overview course at the Art Center in Pasadena. The sessions are run by JPL alum Dave Doody and it's all been more than worth the tuition price.

The other week my class had a private visit to JPL. Following a nice leasurely time in the Spacecraft Museum (so much nicer than being in the shuffle with thousands at the yearly open houses) we got a mega-big-screen (Windows OS on all demonstration 'puters, by the way) show of the new JPL online feature applet Eyes On the Solar System directly from project Technical Consultant Doug Ellison.

Still looking for MARIE and the public release of information on Space and Mars Radiation directly related to Humans higher than LEO.

I've found something odd in the 2006-released NRC report "Space Radiation Hazards and the Vision for Space Exploration, Report of a Workshop".

This 88 page book which you can buy from Amazon or download "free for Personal Use Only" from the National Academies Press is all that we (publically) knew of concerning Space Radiation up to the 2005 Wintergreen Workshop. It is almost as tedious as other NRC reports but worth the read if only to find out that in decades of human "Space flight" our country really hasn't done a whole heck of a lot to figure out exactly what Hazards are out there or how to get around them.

After seeing a number of hits coming into this page from all around Huntville, I checked and the Careers page at the Al-Razaq "Computing Services" site no longer returns an immediate PHP server error. Now, that menu option is linked to the address "http://192.168.100.95/hrapplicant", which fails to load. Is it me or does 192.168.... look a lot like in internal router address? If so then the folks inside the Al-Razaq network think that they have fixed the issue while anyoone testing from the outside is still getting a failure.

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If we save billions in launch and space hardware costs thanks to COTS, does it add up to a real savings in total NASA costs?